Imaging and communication technologies have experienced significant growth over the past several years. This growth has lead to imaging and communication systems of increased sophistication and complexity. Additionally, the size of packaging for imaging and communication systems is continually decreasing. However, the two technologies have remained largely exclusive of one of another in industrial and retail applications.
Retail operations, industrial sites, and so forth often contain imaging systems for scanning bar codes and data matrices contained on items, packages, products, etc. The imaging systems are often very sophisticated, and offer tremendous data management capabilities. However, the imaging and data management systems are ineffective if the bar code or data matrix is not readily available at the same location where the imaging system is maintained.
The need to have the item within a useful proximity of the imaging systems can result in inefficiencies that the data management systems were designed to overcome. Often an operator is required to contact a third party who is near the item, and manually enter the bar code information. This process can result in a variety of costly and time-consuming errors. Therefore, it would be desirable to have an imaging system that included a communication system, wherein the communication system enabled data transfer between the imaging system and remote devices.